Most people who follow a small shop are not waiting to be sold to. They follow you to be reminded you exist, and to feel they know you a little before they ever spend a penny.
That is worth sitting with, because it changes what a post is for. A post is not an advert you drop when you want sales this week. It is one more time a customer sees your face, your bread, your van, your chair. Each time they see you, you become a bit more familiar, and familiar is what people buy.
Take a baker on a high street with three other places that sell a coffee and a sandwich. The one a passer-by picks at half past twelve is rarely the cheapest or the nearest. It is the one they already feel they know. They have seen the sourdough come out of the oven on a Tuesday, seen the hand-written sign in the window, seen the same friendly face behind the counter in a dozen small posts. None of those posts said “buy now”. Together they did the real job. When the person was finally hungry and standing on the pavement, one shop felt like the obvious answer and the others felt like strangers.
There is a plain reason this works. People come to like and trust something simply because they have seen it before, even when nothing else about it has changed. Robert Zajonc showed this in a set of experiments in 1968, and a later review by Robert Bornstein gathered twenty years of studies and found the effect held throughout (Zajonc 1968; Bornstein 1989, Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-Analysis, Psychological Bulletin). The shop that turns up gently and often is not being pushy. It is becoming the familiar one, and the familiar one gets chosen.
So the aim of a post is smaller and easier than most shop owners think. You are not trying to reach thousands of strangers or close a sale in one go. You are trying to be seen, today, by the people near you, being yourself and doing your ordinary work well. Do that often enough and you build up a store of goodwill you can draw on when you do have something to sell.
This is also why the shop that only posts when it wants money tends to struggle. If the last four things a customer saw from you were all “offer ends Friday”, you have taught them that hearing from you means being asked for something. The shop that mostly shows its work, its people and its day, and asks for the sale now and then, is the one people are glad to see.
Two things follow from this, and both are easy.
First, turn up more often than you think you need to, in small ways. A single photo of what you made this morning is a good post. It does not need a clever line or a discount. It needs to be you, and it needs to be regular.
Second, let most of your posts be about the work and the people, not the price. Show the loaf, the finished haircut, the tidy bathroom you have just fitted, the regular who pops in every Friday. Sell plainly when you have a real reason to, and the rest of the time just be the shop people know.
You can see this at work on the Bonfire Night run-up: a handful of small posts across the fortnight beat one loud post on the night, because each one warms people to you a little.
The hard part is not understanding this. It is thinking of something to post today when you are already busy and the shop is full. That is the job the free tool does for you. Open What should I post?, tell it in a line what happened in your shop today, and it gives you back a caption and the words to go on your picture, ready for you to check and put up.